Indonesia's antitrust regulator KPPU made its most explicit pitch yet for specialized digital market legislation when KPPU Chair M Fanshurullah Asa appeared before the DPR's Commission VI on May 26, 2026. The proposal for a standalone Digital Markets Law — Undang-Undang Pasar Digital — cited five categories of harm Indonesia's existing framework cannot adequately address: AI-driven dominance, self-preferencing, service discrimination, cross-subsidized predatory pricing, and algorithmic manipulation. The EU's Digital Markets Act, Asa said, offered the gatekeeper framework Indonesia currently lacks.
He is right about the problem. Whether the EU's solution is the right answer is a harder question.
Law No. 5 of 1999 Wasn't Built for This
Indonesia's competition law — Law No. 5 of 1999 Concerning the Ban on Monopolistic Practices and Unfair Business Competition — was enacted when the internet was still a novelty in the archipelago. Its dominance thresholds (50% for a single firm, 75% for two or three firms collectively) were designed with manufacturing and distribution in mind. The law is reactive by design: investigations can only begin after harm is alleged, and remedies arrive only after conduct has embedded itself in the market.
KPPU's January 2025 decision against Google illustrated both the regulator's ambition and its structural constraints. KPPU found Google had abused its dominant position by mandating exclusive use of Google Play Billing — charging developers fees up to 30% while blocking alternatives — and imposed a record fine of IDR 202.5 billion ($12.6 million). The fine was KPPU's largest ever. It was also, as a February 2025 Jakarta Post analysis noted, equivalent to roughly 0.004% of Google's global annual revenue — not a deterrent so much as a rounding error on a quarterly earnings report.
The problem is not KPPU's resolve; it is the tools the law provides. Fines are too small to discipline trillion-dollar platforms. Investigations are launched ex-post, meaning harmful conduct — algorithmic discrimination, self-preferencing in search rankings, data-fueled market foreclosure — can run for years before a decision is reached. The Shopee-SPX case, in which Shopee's algorithm auto-activated the company's own logistics service while suppressing independent couriers, began in 2022 and resolved only in late 2024 — with a behavioral undertaking rather than a meaningful fine. By then, Shopee Express had captured substantial market share.
The Real Case for Ex-Ante Rules
The strongest argument for KPPU's proposal is not the EU's prestige as a regulatory model — it is the logic of ex-ante regulation itself. Reactive competition law forces the state to prove harm after it has already occurred. Digital platform markets tip quickly: network effects, data advantages, and algorithmic lock-in can cement dominance before a case file is even opened. For Indonesian MSMEs who depend on platforms for discovery, payments, and logistics, years of waiting for a KPPU decision is years of being squeezed by terms they cannot negotiate.
The EU DMA's April 2025 enforcement actions confirm that proactive obligations with proportionate fines can move even the most recalcitrant gatekeepers. The European Commission found Apple in breach of anti-steering obligations (€500 million fine) and Meta in breach for its coercive 'consent or pay' model (€200 million fine). These were not post-hoc remedies imposed after markets had already tipped — they were obligations the DMA had established years earlier, and the fines were calculated as a fraction of global turnover rather than capped at a nominal ceiling. That preventive architecture is precisely what Indonesia's 1999 law lacks.
This logic applies directly to Indonesia's market. The TikTok-Tokopedia vertical combination, GoTo's integration of ride-hailing, payments, and food delivery, and Shopee's bundled logistics create exactly the kind of conglomerate ecosystem that ex-ante behavioral rules are designed to discipline — before the harm becomes irreversible.
Where the EU Template Breaks Down
None of this means Indonesia should transpose the DMA into Bahasa Indonesia and call the problem solved.
The EU DMA was calibrated for a specific regulatory context: it targets global technology giants — Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft — operating within a single market of 450 million consumers. Its gatekeeper designation thresholds (€7.5 billion annual EU revenue, 45 million monthly EU users, €75 billion market capitalization) were written with those firms in mind. Indonesia's dominant platforms are largely Asian — Sea Group's Shopee, ByteDance's TikTok-Tokopedia, locally-incorporated GoTo — and none of them will map cleanly onto European criteria designed for the S&P 500.
There is also the compliance cost problem. The DMA imposes extensive interoperability, data-portability, and audit-reporting obligations that even well-resourced European firms have struggled to meet on schedule. For smaller regional platforms competing in Indonesia's highly contested e-commerce market, blanket DMA-style obligations risk entrenching incumbents who can absorb compliance costs while smaller challengers cannot.
And then there is enforcement capacity. The European Commission has a dedicated DMA directorate with substantial resources. KPPU, despite its record Google decision, operates with far fewer investigators relative to the platforms it now proposes to oversee. A law that creates obligations without practical monitoring is not regulation — it is theater.
What Indonesia Should Build Instead
The KPPU's diagnosis is correct. The legislative work needs local calibration.
An effective Indonesian digital markets framework should set gatekeeper thresholds using domestic revenue and Indonesian active-user counts — not EU metrics. Ex-ante obligations should target specific, documented harms: self-preferencing in search and recommendation, bundled logistics discrimination, and exclusive payment mandates — the exact behaviors KPPU has already litigated, not the full DMA catalog. Fines tied to Indonesia-derived revenue maintain proportionality while actually deterring misconduct at a scale that matters.
KPPU also needs the institutional capacity to enforce whatever law emerges. That means dedicated digital markets investigators, statutory case timelines with interim injunctive powers, and transparent behavioral remedies with real monitoring mechanisms. The EU's own experience has shown that even a strong law lags years behind market reality without enforcement muscle to back it.
Indonesia is ASEAN's largest digital economy and the region's most consequential emerging market for platform regulation. The legislative work now beginning — if it avoids both the trap of weak ex-post frameworks and the trap of EU copy-paste — could produce a regional template more useful to Southeast Asia than the Brussels original.